If Everyone Cared
by Moiranne Rose
Summary: Challenge Fic: We look after our own, we care for our own, and we bury our own. And we're the only ones remembering them. Turk-centric, no pairings, and sadly, no happy ending in sight.


_**Topic for Challenge: Why are you crying?**_

_**Title: "If Everyone Cared"**_

_**Summary: Grieving, Mourning, Dusting Graves, as the World continues spinning, as the Cycle of Life and Death continues turning. Who is left to mourn now?**_

* * *

_From underneath the trees, we watch the sky  
Confusing stars for satellites  
I never dreamed that you'd be mine  
But here we are, we're here tonight_

Don't get him wrong, he wasn't sentimental or anything. But these quiet days staring at the sky made him miss the days that had held the four of them, fighting for something they weren't very sure about. Was it for Rufus? Was it for the Planet? Was it against the Planet? They were never really sure. But they knew two things, that they were fighting, and that they were fighting together. That was all they knew, and all they needed to know.

_Singing Amen, I, I'm alive  
Singing Amen, I, I'm alive  
_

He didn't want to relive the terrible blows, but he still felt the guilt follow him like a fog that just wouldn't let up. If he managed to brush it away for a few minutes, a few hours, it would still come rushing back over him, like the day it had come to him. Or the days. They hadn't died together. No, it was one after another, another falling as the rest struggled their way up. Till the rest became just him, just the leader.

_  
__Chorus:__  
If everyone cared and nobody cried  
If everyone loved and nobody lied  
If everyone shared and swallowed their pride  
Then we'd see the day when nobody died  
_

He returned to those few places, over and over again. Pushing through the familiar crowds with unfamiliar faces of stone, he'd arrive at one of them, flowers held so tightly, that the rose thorns pierced into the skin, not that he cared. It was the price of surviving. And it was a small one. So the bloodstained stalks lay on the marble headstones till the next year.

The first would be in the then worn down highways of Midgar, where they had met the first gang after AVALANCHE. The Black Roses, they called themselves, street fighters hardened in hate for the one company that monopolized the world of martial arts and battle.. He smiled in bitter irony, as he lay the first rose, white, onto the grave of the first to die, one metal bullet had found its way to the heart, gasping in shock, their first loss, Elena.

_And I'm singing  
Amen I, Amen I, I'm alive  
Amen I, Amen I, Amen I, I'm alive  
_

The second lay in the plains near the slums. An alleyway, windy and chilly, the second, yellow rose, lain gently onto the harsh concrete pavement. Remembering that attack had always been difficult. But all he needed to remember was how blood looked purple when it flowed onto their uniforms. How the redness dulled with the blue. And how hard the blade had been to take out. How the long forgotten pair of shades had slipped to the ground, revealing hazel eyes that widened in pain. Rude was next, his body had been burnt to ashes, scattered to the four winds in that fateful draught-filled alley, by the two that were left.  
_  
And in the air the fireflies  
Our only light in paradise  
We'll show the world they were wrong  
And teach them all to sing along_

Then closest to home, on a hill in Wutai, lay the final body of the final person to leave him. He could not stop the tears here. This one time had been entirely his fault. If he hadn't brought him down to the caves, to show him the reconstruction process ongoing, if he hadn't guided him down into the nicest, yet the most unstable part of the cave, if he hadn't walked out that few seconds before him, if he hadn't…Well, he knew that none of that had happened, since he was the last Turk standing, with a scarlet rose held trembling in one hand, gently, slowly, yet reluctantly, onto the beautiful rosewood tree, grown over the gorge, overlooking the fateful caves, nurtured as a seedling, by the same person it now stood in memory of. _  
_

He'd stare at the skies, those few stars, unshielded unlike the cityscape of forever dark Midgar. They looked back at him. There were always those three, shining, looming, smiling almost. Were they all up there? Somewhere along the Lifestream, they were waiting for him. Maybe even laughing silently with the green flow. They had already joined with the Planet; he was the last one left.

_  
Singing Amen, I, I'm alive  
Singing Amen, I, I'm alive  
(I'm alive)_

_Chorus x2_

_And as we lie beneath the stars  
We realize how small we are  
If they could love like you and me  
Imagine what the world could be  
_

And if any passerby would have cared to ask, instead of just staring at him, why he was crying, he might have taken another chance with the harsh world.

If everyone cared, if _anyone_ cared.

But who was he trying to fool? No one even knew they had existed, let alone whether they died.

_  
If everyone cared and nobody cried  
If everyone loved and nobody lied  
If everyone shared and swallowed their pride  
Then we'd see the day when nobody died  
When nobody died..._

_Chorus_

_We'd see the day, we'd see the day  
When nobody died  
We'd see the day, we'd see the day  
When nobody died  
We'd see the day when nobody died_

* * *

**A/N: Angst, whoo hoo, so typical aye? Please, review?  
**

**Moiranne Rose**


End file.
